Description
Book SynopsisCorporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women's Literature offers an examination of contemporary literature from the French-speaking Oceanian region through a focus on four of its most prolific women writers and the ways in which these writers negotiate identity construction through one of the most powerful identity markers in the region: the body. The question of the body how one is to make meaning through corporeality, how one represents the body, and what role the body plays in identity construction is not only a question with which feminists and postcolonial theorists have been grappling for nearly a half-century. The body is of integral significance to autochthonous Oceanian societies, whose views of corporeality are not built upon a dualistic mind-body binary that has influenced Western thought since the era of Descartes, but rather on a cosmological, epistemological axis that comprehends the body as intertwined with symbolic, social, and ideological un
Trade ReviewCorporeal Archipelagos is a profoundly significant and beautifully conceived study of the French-language work of four women from French Polynesia and New Caledonia that combines a thorough knowledge of this literature with a strong theoretical approach. Julia Frengs’s expertise on Oceanian authors Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, Ari’irau, and Chantal Spitz comes through in an unprecedented examination of the centrality of the body to questions with ecological, historical, national, political, sexual, and social import in an oft-overlooked region of Francophone women’s writing. -- Alison Rice, University of Notre Dame
Anyone interested in Pacific Francophone literature should have this book, as it is a very complete work about the question of the Oceanian body in French speaking literature. -- Titaua Porcher-Wiart, Université de la Polynésie Française
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Writing the Body in Oceania Chapter 1: The Instigation and the Perpetuation of the Mythical Oceanian Body Chapter 2: Sexual Violence, Trauma, and the Damaged Oceanian Body Chapter 3: Ecological Bodies: An Ecocritical Lens Chapter 4: Writing Institutionalized Bodies: Breaking out of Confinement Chapter 5: To Speak or not to Speak: Writing the Silent Body Conclusion: Oceanian Literature, or The New Tattoo
